Romanticism and Patriotism:
Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric

Patriot Acts: The Political Language of
Heinrich von Kleist

Jan Mieszkowski, Reed College

Near the close of the Philosophy of Right,
Hegel declares, “Patriotism is frequently
understood to mean . . . a willingness to perform
extraordinary sacrifices and actions. But in
essence, it is that disposition which, in the normal
conditions and circumstances of life, habitually knows
that the community is the substantial basis and
end” (288-89). It is safe to say that
contemporary discussions of patriotism in the United
States share nothing of Hegel's phlegmatic tone. Since
September of 2001, loyalty to country has been
celebrated and condemned in equally vociferous tones.
On the one hand, it is argued that a refusal to affirm
one's devotion to the community by being prepared to
protect it with force amounts to the abandonment of the
most basic of social duties. On the other hand, it is
maintained that the desire to fortify
“ourselves” against “them”
reveals only the pernicious triumph of xenophobia and
the military industrial complex. In this charged
landscape, “I love my country” alternately
means, “I am someone who is willing to fulfill
the minimal obligations of citizenship,” and,
“I am a pathetic pawn of state or corporate
interests.”

For a political theorist, the level of vitriol may
be new, but the terms of the disputes are not. The
belief that patriotism is essentially a form of
nationalism and thus an obstacle to a cosmopolitan or
internationalist ethos has routinely been debated since
the eighteenth century. The question of whether liberal
conceptions of personal freedom are inherently at odds
with communitarian ideals is a similarly traditional
topos of inquiry. From this perspective, our
contemporary polemics—vicious though they may
be—are merely one moment in a longstanding
discussion about the intersecting dialectics of the
public and private and the general and the
particular.

If there is nonetheless something peculiarly
unsettling about loving the terra patria, it
may lie in the suggestion that politics is partly
grounded in affects rather than rights and principles.
Patriotism reminds us that a subjective, even whimsical
element plagues an arena in which we hope that due
process and the rigor of formal systems will hold sway.
A politics of affect is threatening because it
highlights forces that do not readily permit of
quantification, forces that garner their authority from
the singularity of their expression rather than from
the degree to which they can be communicated or
compared with one another. More specifically, it could
be argued that the unease inspired by patriotism is a
factor of the specific affect it privileges, namely,
love. As the Ciceronian model of republicanism made
explicit, the goal in adoring one’s civic order
is to assume a posture vis-à-vis the state like
that of a dutiful child to a parent.[1]
This would appear to indicate that patriotism is just
one form of celebrating the patriarchy, or more
bluntly: Loving your country is a semi-covert way of
indulging your infantile narcissism and its aggressive
impulses. Cast in this light, one does not have to be
of the opinion that the United States is governed by a
plutocracy to want to avoid grounding the relationship
between individuals and their rulers in a murky notion
of amor.

Given the anxieties patriotism invokes on the Left
and the Right alike, one cannot help but notice that
there is a widespread reluctance to give up on the
concept—even, and perhaps especially, if
preserving it necessitates re-crafting the term so that
we can speak of a cosmopolitan or global patriot rather
than a national one. Like its obverse, hate, love can
be a troubling commodity for policymakers, but it
proves to be extremely useful when it can be harnessed
for specific ends. The question, then, is whether
modern political theory offers us a model with which to
understand these affective dynamics. In proposing to
explore these issues by looking at German writers from
the turn of the nineteenth century, I may appear to be
making an odd choice. Germany is not typically held up
as an example of a country that has come to terms with
the problem of patriotism in a salutary fashion. Even
if one looks to the Enlightenment as a moment when the
concept of the European nation-state was being
forged—hence, as a point in time at which certain
progressive possibilities may not yet have been
foreclosed on—the study may feel more like the
investigation of the aetiology of a disease than an
excavation of laudable principles that have
hithertofore been neglected.

These concerns notwithstanding, my argument in this
essay is that the Continental thinkers who follow
Immanuel Kant offer some crucial alternatives to the
familiar liberal positions on citizenship, the
individual, and the state. To appreciate this dimension
of their work, we will have to break with some of the
most well established clichés of European
intellectual history. A dynamic of autonomous
subjectivity is customarily presumed to have absolute
priority in the tradition that runs from Fichte through
Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis (Friedrich von
Hardenberg) to Schelling and Hegel. In considering the
individual’s relationship to the state, however,
these authors elaborate ethical and political dynamics
that are not simply based on a model of a rational,
active self—whether it is the self understood as
the source of absolute authority, as monarchial
sovereignty might have it, or the self viewed as the
bearer of interests and responsibilities, as the
liberal paradigm would maintain. For example, in their
analysis of the polity Schlegel and Novalis are first
and foremost concerned not with figures of
self-positing (self-creation and self-destruction), but
with the potentially more fundamental notion of
self-affection. The elementary event whereby the mind
impacts itself before there is, properly speaking,
anything to impact is described in the Critique of
Pure Reason, where Kant writes of a form of
intuition, “the mode in which the mind is
affected through its own activity . . . and so is
affected by itself (87).[2]
Kant’s reflexive “to affect oneself”
(sich affizieren) comes from the Latin
afficere: “to affect,” “to
act upon,” “to excite.” Neither
active nor passive, neither a model of self-positing
nor self-reflection, self-affection—the
mind’s capacity to “touch”
itself—is the posture that facilitates all other
mental activities even as it is indifferent to
them.

In an overtly paradoxical fashion, the state of mind
Kant describes exists only insofar as it corresponds
with itself before it is there; it is a subjective mode
of being that emerges only to the extent that it
constantly handles itself as a determined entity that
it has not already become. Only in virtue of this
self-misrecognition—this mistaken touching of the
self by a self, “itself,” that is not yet
there to touch or be touched—is there a self at
all. Governed by a movement that is anything but
self-contained or self-grounding, such a being never
presents itself to itself as something it can know as
its own creation, which means that self-relation is no
longer the distinguishing characteristic of the
subject. This radically calls into question any effort
to base political morphology in the reflexive praxis of
an individual agent—a point that has enormous
implications for the Romantic reception of
Rousseau’s theory of the general will, the modern
understanding of the body politic, and the very notion
of political representation as such.[3]

What does it mean, then, to be a patriot in an
intellectual climate in which the figure of the
self-determining individual is no longer the principal
avatar of political agency? What implications does the
concept of self-affection have for a theory of
citizenship and for our ideas about being a member of a
community, that is, what are the measures of loyalty or
responsibility if self-rule is no longer the standard
of subjective praxis? Perhaps most importantly, how
does the Kantian dynamic of self-affection come to be
understood as an explicitly linguistic problem? To
explore these questions, I want to turn to a play that
is primarily known for its celebration of the pleasures
of hating and killing one’s enemies. Die
Hermannsschlacht, The Battle of Hermann,
was written in 1808 by Heinrich von Kleist, who, like
his contemporaries, spent his career laboring in the
long shadow of Kant’s first Critique.
Biographically speaking, Kleist stands out among the
intellectuals of his day for his vigorous patriotism.
Coming from a long line of Prussian nobility and
military officers, he served in the wars against the
French revolutionary army in the 1790s, ultimately
quitting when he decided that his courageous endeavors
against the foes of the Fatherland were being cheapened
by the King’s decision to hire mercenaries with
no real partisan convictions.[4]
During the first decade of the nineteenth century,
Kleist was no longer a combatant, but in his personal
correspondence, he constantly bemoaned the evils of
Napoleon and the French threat to Prussian autonomy,
and he spent some time as a prisoner of war, probably
because he had been caught spying on the enemy.
[5]

Where his literary productions were concerned,
Kleist maintained that two of his plays were especially
patriotic in intent and design: The Battle of
Hermann and Prince Friedrich von
Homburg. At first glance, this common thematic
ground would seem to be the only similarity between
these works. If Prince Friedrich is dreamy,
bloodless, and overtly self-parodic, The Battle
of Hermann has struck many as a crude, not to
mention extremely violent, piece of propaganda. For
most of the twentieth century, its jingoistic dimension
was thought to overwhelm any moral or aesthetic content
it might have, an assessment typified by Walter
Müller-Seidel’s claim that it is only with
great reservation that one can even grant the text a
place (presumably “last” place) among
Kleist’s other poetic works (53). Indeed,
Hermann has been dismissed as ill-conceived or
immature with such regularity that one could be
forgiven for supposing that Kleist had written it as a
schoolboy, whereas in fact it was composed around the
same time as Penthesilea, usually regarded as
his dramatic masterpiece.[6]

The Battle of Hermann is based on
Tacitus’s account of the victory of the Germanic
tribes and their leader Hermann over the Roman general
Quintilius Varus in 9 A. D., an event that at least
temporarily halted the Roman conquest of Northern
Europe. In the course of five acts, we are presented
with a variety of negotiations, intrigues, and
battlefield clashes between the invaders and the
various German rulers, some of whom have allied
themselves with the Romans, some against them, and some
somewhere in-between. In the culmination of the
military action, the forces of Hermann and his fellow
chieftain Marbod ambush the enemy and defeat them. The
Roman General is killed by a one-time German ally, and
Hermann is hailed as the savior of Germania.

In the course of the drama, the patriotic fervor of
the German people is fanned through a host of devious
and sometimes grizzly tactics. At one point, Hermann
has some soldiers dress as Romans and plunder their own
land in order to enrage the inhabitants against the
invaders; in another scene, the corpse of a German maid
who has been raped by Romans and then murdered by her
father is chopped into enough pieces so that a part of
the body can be sent to each of the German tribes. Both
of these acts exemplify the broader structure of a play
in which efforts to confirm the boundaries between us
and them, between friend and foe, inevitably introduce
duplicitous signifying logics that no one controls.

Following Kleist’s own suggestions,
The Battle of Hermann is typically
treated as a thinly-veiled allegory of the Europe of
1809: the Romans stand in for the French aggressors,
while Hermann and his allies represent the Prussians,
or possibly the Austrians, who at the time were
preparing for an invasion of France.[7]
In these terms, Kleist was hardly innovative. A number
of eighteenth-century German literary works present the
quasi-historical figure of Hermann as a rallying point
for contemporary partisan passions. At the same time,
one should not underestimate the uniquely programmatic
pretensions of Kleist’s play. Wolf Kittler has
heralded it as a primer on guerrilla warfare, a kind of
counterpart before the fact to Carl von
Clausewitz’s famous treatise on conventional
combat (“Concept” 508-510). Indeed, Kittler
has even gone so far as to argue that the drama
expresses Kleist’s heart-felt desire to incite
insurrection among the German people (Geburt
342).

The ideological stakes of such an ambition are
anything but self-evident. Accordingly, as is typical
for almost all of Kleist’s works, suggestions
abound as to the real target of the attacks the play
invites or effects. Among other things,
Hermann has been described as a critique of
Christian morality, of the incompatibility of
aristocratic and bourgeois social theory, and, perhaps
most conventionally, of Enlightenment subjectivity. It
is the central role of violence in the text, however,
that has inspired the greatest interpretive anxieties.
In a positive vein, Seán Allan has written that
“Die Hermannsschlacht explores the
nature of the acts of violent retribution committed in
the struggle to overthrow the oppressive regime of a
colonial power” (235). Against this affirmation
of the value of armed resistance, Georg Lukács
famously accused Kleist of emotional anarchy,
identifying his œuvre as a forerunner to the
aesthetics of National Socialism because Kleist’s
anti-humanism—unlike that of, for instance, Karl
Marx—never goes beyond the level of mere revolt
(7: 217ff.) Taking these same concerns in the opposite
direction, it can be argued that The Battle of
Hermann is as much a warning about the politics of
“strong” leadership as it is a celebration
of an indigenous people’s self-assertion in the
face of imperialist aggression. With Kleist’s
much-vaunted antipathy for Napoleon as a background,
the story of Hermann can thus be read as a prime
example of why a polity based in the cult status of an
individual is fated to endure chaos and disaster. After
all, at the close of the play, having just been
denounced as a tyrant by a countryman he has casually
sent for execution, the German leader uses his final
speech to paint a graphic picture of a bellicose
future, suggesting that if a Pax Germanica is
to replace the Pax Romana, it will be no more
faithful to the title of peace than its
predecessor.

Yet what are the real stakes of this nationalist
war, a war that at the end of The Battle of
Hermann, as at the end of Prince Friedrich von
Homburg, seems more perpetual than winnable? From
its opening scenes, The Battle of Hermann
depicts a struggle over the possibility, or
impossibility, of a figure such as Hermann functioning
as a truly historical agent. Unsurprisingly, this
battle over Hermann is largely fought by Hermann
himself, but it is not waged in the terms one might
expect. In an early discussion with the other German
rulers who are trying to recruit him to the resistance,
Hermann gives voice to a number of curious positions.
With great eloquence, he insists that he strives not to
win but to be defeated by the Roman Emperor, that he
aims to lose everything, and that he must stand alone,
bound with no one but God, staking everything to
forfeit it all in death as Germany goes up in flames.
Needless to say, Hermann’s compatriots are
confused, but they are soon somehow reassured of his
support. By the close of their conversation, Hermann is
talking about his progeny marching on Rome, and his
fellow chieftains have switched from calling him
incomprehensible to deciding that he stands with them
in their struggle against the Romans. Most
interpretations of this scene and its relationship to
the ensuing story treat Hermann’s various quirky
declarations as part of a program of persuasion and
reverse-psychological brinkmanship with which he
intends to put himself, his associates, and the German
populace in the best position to achieve liberation.
Once this figure of Hermann the Machiavellian Magician
is introduced, it can be used to explain his or any
other character’s behavior—however odd or
out of place. Deferring to Hermann’s omnipotence
considerably simplifies the task of working through the
plot of the later acts, since at any given moment it is
hard to decide whether a particular combatant is being
operationally shrewd or if he or she is simply getting
lucky. A clever ruse may be a serendipitous blunder or
vice versa, and it is not obvious that any of the
characters are terribly concerned with telling the
difference.[8]

Our approach to the text changes somewhat once we
realize that the fact that Hermann does go on to lead
his people to victory does not in any respect
contradict his opening statement that he aims only to
lose. To the contrary, it is precisely because this
strange stance is Hermann’s position throughout
that he is able to do something worthy of the name
“patriotic.” Following Hermann’s own
hints when he mocks his fellow German leaders because
their conception of freedom amounts to protecting their
property from alien marauders rather than exercising
autonomy, it is tempting to argue that Hermann strives
to embody a Kantian ideal of freedom—a pure
spontaneity of agency that corresponds with nothing,
not even itself. When Hermann avers that in this
struggle he must stand alone, allied with no one, he is
merely spelling out the basic requirements of genuine
independence. A truly free, and thus admirable,
demonstration of one’s commitment to one’s
people or nation must take the form of an act that
eludes any calculus, standard, or guide that would
pre-exist it as its cause or condition of possibility.
Such an act must therefore appear as a kind of misstep,
a mis-act; indeed, it can scarcely be recognizable as
an act at all, or it is at risk of being treated as the
effect of something other than itself. What this play
calls “history,” then, is an activity that
explodes any continuum between a present, a past that
would make the present possible, and a future that the
present proleptically (and later retrospectively)
grounds. Hermann strives to be defeated because he
strives to realize a praxis that is not an inevitable
consequence of what is, has been, or might conceivably
be the case. He strives to do something that will tear
itself free of any smooth modulation from potentiality
to actuality. As a result, Hermann’s actions must
be as impossible as they are possible, as liable to be
worthless as vital, as likely to be missed
opportunities as well-chosen maneuvers. If this bizarre
historical agency cannot be realized, then there can be
no difference between what happens and what could
happen, and all events will be equally inevitable or
random. In other words, without Hermann’s embrace
of pure loss, there is no possibility of a divide
between what might take place and what does take place,
no one can take credit for having said or done anything
truly on their own, and there is certainly no way to
envision something that could genuinely be called an
act of resistance.

Ironically, then, a play that ostensibly offers an
ancient insurrection as a model for modern insurrection
begins by rejecting the authority of repetition as the
quintessential historical force. Whatever Hermann
represents—the will of the people, the future of
his tribe, the last hope for Germany—he can play
his role only insofar as he stands outside of any
continuum of possibility and actuality that would
seamlessly shape the future on the basis of the
resources of the past. In fact, something very similar
happens in Prince Friedrich von Homburg, the
text Kleist designated as his other patriotic drama.
There, the eponymous Prince Friedrich cannot be
heralded as a true soldier until he has become so
fearful and abject that he is said to have fallen out
of an historical logic in which his actions could
constitute the fame of a hero, articulating the present
with the future. Only at the point at which it is
impossible to view the Prince as an agent of the
Fatherland—the point at which his behavior is
literally an impossibility—can he become a real
patriot. In Kleist, we might say, one fights not in
order that Germany may rise again, but rather to show
that Germany may rise again only insofar as we prove
that there is no way for Germany to rise again.

The movement of such a patriotic agency is not the
self-positing or self-negating of an absolute subject,
but the self-affecting discourse of a language that no
individual hero can call his own. Strife in The
Battle of Hermann does not fundamentally take the
form of a clash between peoples, cultures, or ideals.
It is manifested rather in the exercise of a familiar
yet unique utterance, an interjection that emerges at
the limits of grammar and reference: the word
heil, as in “Heil
Caesar,” or perhaps in this case,
“Heil the conqueror of Caesar.” At
the end of the play, the Romans defeated, Hermann
speaks to his ally: “Heil Marbod, my
magnanimous friend! / And if Germania hears my voice: /
Heil its overlord and king” (l.
2569-2571).[9]
For better or worse, Marbod responds in kind:
“Heil, I call you Hermann, the savior of
Germania. / And when [Germania] hears my voice: /
Heil its overlord and king”
(l.2578-2580). To some degree, the expostulation
heil is obviously a hailing; but it is hardly
an unequivocal one. More than a mere address to or
announcement of the appearance of an individual, it is
a performative utterance: “You are our ruler, our
leader, our savior, because you are the one to whom we
say ‘heil.’” Heil
is also a kind of command. It orders you to be greeted,
and to be greeted as the one worthy of, or in need of,
greeting: “Be the Hermann, be he who is
the King of Germania, a country that should be there to
hear us say that you are to be its ruler.” In
this sense, heil is a demand to be heard, a
demand to be recognized as a voice that can speak a
political language, a language that can call leaders
and lands into existence.

Somewhere among these many orders and entreaties, we
can begin to detect an element of uncertainty, as if
the various stipulations of heil are not or
cannot always be met to perfection. The grammar of the
interjection heil hovers between the
indicative and the subjunctive: Heil dem
König says, “Long Live the King!”
or “God Save the King!” It does not say:
“The King will live a long life,”
or “God will save the King.”
Moreover, Heil dem König is not primarily
directed to the object it ostensibly names as the
target of its “greeting.” On the contrary,
with “Long Live (or God Save) the King!”
God or fate is being asked to preserve the monarch as
he or she makes an entrance, while the
sovereign’s role in the situation remains
decidedly uncertain. In other words, “Heil
Hermann” may be uttered “to” or
“in the presence of” someone named Hermann,
but it can never be entirely to, for, or about him.
Whatever proper noun or title we insert after
heil, the word inexorably reasserts its
relative independence vis-à-vis the declarations
that enlist its services. In this sense, the utterance
heil is as much an attempt at a salutation,
acclamation, or blessing of itself as of anything else.
Heilheil, we might say,
heil the power of heil to signify,
posit, or demand. Underscoring the repetition that
heil seems to require, the Grimm Brothers note
that in the eighteenth century the word appears in a
number of overtly redundant expressions, including
Heil und Segen (“Bless you, bless
you”) and Heil und Glück
(“Good luck, good luck”). The curious
relation of heil to its own iterability is
very much in evidence at the end of Kleist’s
other patriotic play, when the impossibly abject Prince
Friedrich is welcomed back into Prussian respectability
in a bizarre ceremony that culminates with the
Colonel’s declaration: “Heil,
Heil the Prince of Homburg” (l.
1854).[10]
The accolade is ordinary, and certainly respectful, but
it remains incomplete until the accompanying officers
add: “Heil, heil,
heil!” (1855). Order is restored and
everyone goes off to fight (in this case, the Swedes
rather than the Romans), but all of this can happen
only because it has supposedly been shown that it is
possible to say heil to heil.
Patriotism takes place, then, not when the characters
salute the King or the Fatherland, but when they salute
the language of salute, or rather, when they yield to
language’s own salute to itself. What
heil first and foremost attempts to acclaim is
the power of language to acclaim. Heil is the
affirmation language seeks to offer language; it is
language’s greeting to itself as that which
should be able to greet, confirm, or at least give
voice to the hope that something will be the
case—for instance, that Hermann, or Marbod, will
be the King of Germania.[11]

The problem is that the very need to say
heil seems to contravene its stated intent.
Like the English hail (as in “Hail to
the Chief”), the German interjection comes from
the Old Norse word for whole
(“complete”), a meaning that is obvious in
modern German in which the adjective heil
means “undamaged” and the verb
heilen is “to heal.”[12]
Yet precisely because it is neither simply prescriptive
nor descriptive, neither purely constative nor
performative, heil risks rendering the
“whole” incomplete by revealing that, as
with the exchange between Hermann and Marbod, the ruler
is not the ruler unless he is hailed, confirmed or
better, called out—challenged to show
that he can dare to rule with reference and deference
to the authority of heil. For aspiring
politicians, the lesson could not be clearer: The only
safe answer to heil is heil. No other
utterance can “perform” the operation
expressed with heil; no other utterance can
refer to what heil does; and most importantly,
no other utterance can pretend to get along without
it.

To return to the Kantian terms with which we began,
heil is linguistic self-affection. It heralds
not a discourse of positing and reflection, but a
movement of obedience to a language whose very
condition of possibility does not yet exist. All
language is affected by heil, which is also to
say that all language must seek to assert its radical
independence from heil, i.e., all language
must aim to fulfill the impossible task of being
“whole” without it. For Kleist, the name
for the effort to effect a discourse that could be
based on something other than a dynamic of
self-affection is “patriotism.” In this
way, The Battle of Hermann shows us that real
devotion to the community rests not on our capacity to
serve our government or to acknowledge the primacy of
the public over the private, but on our ability to
intervene in the acts by which language seeks to
correspond with a form, structure, or law that is,
strictly speaking, inconceivable. It is from this
perspective that we can begin to reread the liberal
tradition and its understanding of citizenship,
focusing less on clashes between individual and state
interests and more on the forms of linguistic violence
that give shape to subjective praxis.

3. In
Schlegel, the consequences of this transformation are
perhaps most evident in the notion of political
representation as a melancholic fiction of surrogacy that
he develops in his "Essay on the Concept of Republicanism."
The extent to which Kantian self-affection invites an
explicit consideration of political affect is even clearer
in Novalis's "Faith and Love," where Liebe names
the condition of possibility and impossibility of a
relationship between a monarch and his or her subjects.

4. See in
particular Kleist's note to his friend Adolfine von Werdeck
in November of 1801 (2: 700).

5. In one
typical letter, Kleist marvels that nobody has put a bullet
in the head of the "evil world spirit," Napoleon (1: 761).
Unsurprisingly, discussions of Kleist's personal history
and his remarks in his private correspondence have led to a
wide range of contradictory conclusions about his positions
on militarism, nationalism, and patriotism. These issues
become more complicated if we ask whether his literary
texts and his life are in some sense "consistent" on these
points. For one of the most far-reaching considerations of
these issues, see Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des
Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie.

6. In his
In Pursuit of Power: Heinrich von Kleist's
Machiavellian Protagonists, William C. Reeve offers a
detailed overview of the critical reception of the play.
Working against the tendency among commentators to
highlight the differences between Hermann and the
later Prince Friedrich, Reeve has also argued that
the former text is a crucial forerunner to the latter. (see
"Die Hermannsschlacht: A Prelude to Prinze
Friedrich von Homburg.")

7. "We are
the people subjugated by the Romans. The plundering of
Europe in order to enrich France is anticipated," wrote
Kleist to his sister Ulrike on October 24, 1806, ten days
after the Prussian army was crushed in the battle of Jena
and Auerstädt (2:771).

8. For an
excellent analysis of the rhetorical structure of the play
and the difficulties that arise in trying to take any given
character "at his or her word," see Jan Plug, "The Borders
of a Lip: Kleist, language, and politics."

9.
Citations from the play (Sämtliche Werke
1:533-628-709) are referenced by line number. All
translations are my own.

10.
Citations from Prince Friedrich von Homburg
(Sämtliche Werke 1:629-709) are referenced by
line number. All translations are my own.

11. More
than half a century after the fall of Nazi Germany, it is
still impossible to discuss the German word heil
without immediately conjuring up thoughts of the infamous
Hitergruß. It could be argued that the
structure of this salute, whereby "Heil Hitler" is
supplemented with a movement of the arm and hand, aims to
mime the iterability internal to any utterance of
heil. This may be an effort to stabilize the
dynamics we have been describing, an attempt to reconfirm
the authority of the verbal utterance by complimenting it
with a physical manifestation of "tribute." From the
perspective of Walter Benjamin's reading of Bertolt
Brecht's Epic Theater as a Theater of Gestus, one
could take this notorious Nazi greeting as an opportunity
to explore the political significance of the body as an
explicitly linguistic problematic. On the asesthetics and
poetics of gesture, see Nägele, esp. 151-158.

12. In
German, heilen means to heal or to cure, not "to
hail," as in English. ("To hail" is zujubeln, bejubeln,
or zurufen.) The German adjective heil means
"unhurt," "uninjured," "undamaged"; wieder heil
werden is "to get better"; heil nach Hause is
"to get home safe and sound"; and heil machen is
"to make better" (reparieren). The noun
Heil means "well-being," "good," or
"salvation."

Works Cited

Allan, Seán. “Violence and
Revenge in the Works of Kleist.” A Companion to
the Works of Heinrich von Kleist. Ed. Bernd Fischer.
Rochester: Camden House, 2003.

Schlegel, Friedrich. “Essay on the
Concept of Republicanism occasioned by the Kantian Tract
‘Perpetual Peace.'” The Early Political
Writings of the German Romantics. Ed. Frederick C.
Beiser. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
93-112.